by Primo Levi
He left the track and let the others pass him. When he found himself next to Dov, he said, “You’re tired, uncle: let me say that without offense. Come here, climb onto the tails of my skis and wrap your arms around me; it will be easier on you.” Dov obeyed without a word, and the pair were soon at the head of the line again. It was better for everyone: under the double weight the snow packed harder, and those on foot hardly sank in at all. Line, the lightest of them, was wearing a pair of oversized combat boots, and she floated on the surface of the snow as if she were wearing snowshoes; Leonid was never more than a handsbreadth away from her. They walked until nightfall, spent the night in a bivouac Pyotr knew, and resumed their march the following morning. They came within view of the camp sooner than expected, in midafternoon, under a bright and unnaturally warm sun. “Within view,” of course, only for someone who knew where and how the camp was situated. Pyotr showed them a vast section of forest to the southwest that, like a horizon line drawn with a fine paintbrush, separated the white of the snow from the light blue of the winter sky. Out there, somewhere in the midst of the trees, was the encampment of Ulybin’s band; they’d get there that night, but not in a straight line. It was a lesson taught by experience and one they’d paid for dearly: never leave trails that are too easy to read in clear, windless weather. They had to make a detour; they would resume the correct direction in the shelter of the trees.
The former citizens of the marshes felt as if they were dreaming. Novoselky had been a precarious salvation and a clever improvisation: the camp they were now entering was a professional piece of work, the product of three years’ experience. Mendel and Leonid were able to contrast the organizational strength of Ulybin’s band with the reckless and overweening undertakings of Venyamin’s wandering band.
In the depths of the forest, barely visible to the careless eye, they found a group of three wooden barracks, almost completely buried, arranged along the three sides of an equilateral triangle. At the center of the triangle, every bit as hard to see, were the kitchen and the well. The chimney that scattered the smoke into the tangled tree branches wasn’t an invention unique to Novoselky: they’d come up with the same solution here. When the time is ripe, certain ideas sprout in different places, and there are circumstances in which problems have only one solution.
In Novoselky, Dov had joked about Leonid’s profession: he had no need for an accountant. In Turov they found one, or, rather, a quartermaster in the full performance of his duties. At the same time, he was a representative of the NKVD and a political commissar, and he dealt with the newcomers with brisk efficiency. Name, patronymic, corps affiliation for those in the military, age, profession, registration of identity papers (though few of them had any); then to bed, they’d take care of everything else in the morning. That’s right, to bed: inside each barrack was a stove and a board covered with clean straw, and the air was warm and dry, even though the floor was almost two meters below ground level. Mendel fell asleep in a whirl of tangled impressions: he felt exhausted, out of place, and yet protected, less of a father and more of a child, safer and less free, at home and in a barrack; but sleep came immediately, like a merciful blow to the head.
The following morning, the camp offered the refugees nothing less than a hot bath, decorously separated for the women and the men, in a vat placed in the kitchen area. What followed was a delousing, or rather an invitation to perform a conscientious personal self-examination, and the distribution of linen, rough and not new but clean. Last of all, an enormous kasha, filling and hot, eaten communally, with real spoons on real aluminum plates, followed by plenty of sweet tea. It promised to be a beautiful day, with singularly mild weather for that season: where the snow was exposed to the sun, it showed signs of melting, which caused some uneasiness. “We’re better off when it freezes,” Pyotr told Mendel, as he was showing him around. “When it thaws, if we’re not careful, we’ll have flooding in the barracks and we’ll drown in mud.” He proudly showed them the electrical system. A talented mechanic had adapted the bevel gears from an old mill to fit the transmission of a German truck: a blindfolded horse was walking slowly in a circle and, through the system of gears, was operating a dynamo that, in turn, charged a group of batteries. When everything was working, the batteries powered the electric lighting and the two-way radio. “Instead of the horse, in the fall we used four Hungarian prisoners, for seven days.”
“And then did you kill them?” asked Mendel.
“We kill only Germans, and even them not always. We aren’t like them; we get no pleasure from killing. Blindfolded as they were, we took them to the far side of the river and let them go where they wanted. They were a little dizzy.”
Pyotr warned the newcomers not to try to leave the camp—in fact, not to go more than thirty meters or so from the barracks. “All around, the forest is mined. There are mines buried seven centimeters deep under the earth, and there are trip-wire mines, with string stretched out under the snow. We did good work: secretly, night after night, we cleared a German minefield, retrieved the mines, and laid them here. We didn’t lose a single man in the process, and since then the Germans have left us alone. But we don’t really leave them alone.”
Pyotr seemed to be attracted to and curious about the group of ten he had found in the izba and had come so close to killing; he was especially friendly with Mendel. He showed him a project, an idea that Mikhail, the radio operator, had come up with and implemented all by himself. In the corner of his barracks there was an ancient, pedal-operated printing press, with a small supply of Cyrillic and Latin characters. Mikhail wasn’t a typesetter, but he’d managed. He had composed a bilingual propaganda poster, set on a two-page spread, similar in every detail to the ones with which the Germans had flooded all the cities and villages in occupied Russia. The German text was copied from the original German posters: it promised the restoration of private property and the reopening of the churches, it invited young people to enlist in the Labor Organization, and it threatened serious penalties for partisans and saboteurs. The Russian text on the facing page was not a translation of the German text; rather, it was the exact opposite. It said:
Young Soviets! Do not believe the Germans, who have invaded our homeland and are massacring our people. Do not work for them; if you go to Germany you’ll suffer hunger and the whip, and they’ll brand you like livestock; when you return home (if you return home!) you’ll have to reckon with socialist justice. Not a man, not a kilo of wheat, not a jot of information to Hitler’s executioners! Come with us, enlist in the Partisan Army!
In both versions there were many spelling mistakes, but they weren’t the radiotelegraphist’s fault: there was a shortage of a’s and e’s in the type tray, and so he’d replaced them with the characters that seemed to him to fit best. He had printed several hundred copies, and they had been distributed and posted all the way out to Baranovichi, Rivne, and Minsk.
There were plenty of light weapons to repair and oil: in Turov, Mendel immediately found work. In the hours when he was free of duties, Pyotr never left his side.
“Are all ten of you Jews?”
“No, just six: me, the two women, the young man who’s always with the small young woman, the older man you carried on your skis, and Pavel Yurevich, the strongest one of all. The other four are stray partisans who reached us just before the Germans destroyed our camp.”
“Why do the Germans want to kill you all?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Mendel replied. “You’d have to understand the Germans, and I’ve never been able to. The Germans think that a Jew is worth less than a Russian, and a Russian worth less than an Englishman, and that a German is worth more than all of them; and they think that when one man’s worth more than another he has the right to do whatever he wants with him, even enslave or kill him. Maybe not all of them really believe it, but this is what they teach them at school, and these are things that their propaganda says.”
“I believe that a Russian’s worth more
than a Chinese,” said Pyotr, thoughtfully, “but unless China did something bad to Russia, I’d never think of killing all the Chinese.”
Mendel said, “Well, I don’t believe that it makes a lot of sense to say that one man’s worth more than another. One man might be stronger than another one but not as wise. Or better educated but less courageous. Or more generous but also stupider. So his worth depends on what you want from him; someone can be very good at his job, and be worthless if you set him to do another kind of work.”
“It’s just as you say,” said Pyotr, his face brightening. “I was the treasurer of the Komsomol, but I couldn’t concentrate, I got the accounts wrong, and everyone laughed at me and said I was good for nothing. Then the war came, I volunteered immediately, and ever since I’ve had the feeling that I’m more valuable. It’s a strange thing: I don’t like killing, but I do like shooting, and so then killing doesn’t really bother me. At first it wasn’t like that, I held back, and I had a pretty stupid idea about things. I thought that the Germans, instead of having flesh like ours, were sheathed in steel, and that bullets bounced off them. I don’t think that anymore; I’ve killed plenty of Germans, and I’ve seen that they’re just as soft as we are, if not softer. What about you, Jew: how many Germans have you killed?”
“I don’t know,” Mendel replied. “I was in the artillery. You understand, it’s not like with a rifle, you position your weapon, you aim, you fire, and you see nothing; if you’re lucky, you’ll see the explosion from your shell when it hits, five or ten kilometers away. Who can say how many died by my hand? Maybe a thousand, maybe not even one. You get your orders over the phone or by radio, in a headset: three degrees left, elevation minus one degree, you do as you’re told, and that’s the end of it. It’s like flying in a bomber, or when you pour acid into an anthill to kill the ants: a hundred thousand ants might die but you don’t feel a thing, you don’t even notice. But in my hometown the Germans ordered the Jews to dig a ditch, then they lined them up along the edge, and they shot them all, even the children, and even a number of Christians who were hiding Jews, and among those killed was my wife. Ever since then, I’ve believed that killing is wrong, but that we have no alternative to killing Germans. From far away or close up, the way you do or the way we do. Because killing is the only language they understand, the only reasoning that persuades them. If I shoot at a German, he’s forced to admit that I, a Jew, am every bit as good as he is: it’s his logic, you understand, not mine. They only understand force. Sure, convincing someone as he dies may not be very useful, but in the long run his comrades will also start to understand something. The Germans only started to understand something after Stalingrad. There, that’s why it’s important that there be Jewish partisans, and Jews in the Red Army. It’s important, but it’s also horrible; only if I kill a German will I manage to persuade other Germans that I am a man. And yet we have a law that says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“. . . Still, you’re strange. You’re strange people. It’s one thing to shoot and it’s another to think things through. If you think too much, you can’t shoot straight, and you people always think too much. Maybe that’s why the Germans are killing you. Take me, for instance, I’ve been in the Komsomol since I was a kid, I’d give my life for Stalin the way my father did, I believe in Christ as the saviour of the world the way my mother does, I like vodka, I like girls, I even like to shoot, and I’m happy to live here in the steppe hunting Fascists, and I don’t waste a lot of time thinking about it. If one of my ideas doesn’t fit perfectly with another one, I don’t really give a damn.”
Mendel was listening with his ears and half his brain, while with the other half and with his hands he was using oil to clean the rust off the screws and springs of an automatic rifle he’d disassembled. He took advantage of that confidential moment to ask Pyotr a question that mattered deeply both to him and to Dov.
“What’s become of your deputy commander? Wasn’t a certain Gedale here with you, Gedale Skidler, a Jew, half Russian and half Polish, who fought in Kosava? A tall guy, with a hook nose and a wide mouth?”
Pyotr took his time replying: he looked up and scratched his beard, as if summoning to mind memories that had vanished years ago. Then he said, “Sure, sure. Gedale, of course. But he was never deputy commander; sometimes he just gave orders, when Ulybin was away. He’s on a mission, Gedale. He’ll be back, sure: in a week, or maybe two or even three weeks. Or maybe he’s even been transferred: in the partizanka, nothing is ever certain.”
This Pyotr is much better at covering ground on skis than he is at telling lies, Mendel said to himself. Then, with a laugh, he asked:
“Was he one of those who think too much?”
“It’s not that he thought too much: no, certainly not that, that wasn’t his problem, but he certainly was strange, him, too. I already told you, you Jews really are a little strange, one way or another, and I’m not saying it as a criticism. This Gedale could shoot almost as well as I could, I don’t know who taught him; but he wrote poetry, and he always carried a violin with him.”
“He composed songs and played them on the violin?”
“No, the poems were one thing and the violin was another. He played it at night; he had it with him in August, when the Germans launched their big roundup around Luninets. We managed to sneak out through the encirclement, but a sniper shot him: the bullet went through the violin from one side to the other, which blunted the impact so that it didn’t hurt him at all. He fixed the holes with pine resin and bandages from the infirmary, and since then he’s always carried the violin with him. He said that it sounded better than ever, and he even attached a bronze medal that we found on a dead Hungarian. You can see what a strange guy he was.”
“If we were all the same, what a dull world this would be. We have a special blessing that we utter to God when we see a person who’s different from others: a midget, a giant, a black man, a man covered with warts. We say: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who creates such varied creatures.’ If we bless him for warts, then all the more reason to praise him for a partisan who plays the violin.”
“You have a point, and at the same time you drive me crazy. That’s the way Gedale was, too. He always wanted to have his say, and he never got along with Ulybin, or for that matter with Maksim; Maksim is the quartermaster, that is, the scribbler, the one who keeps the books and comes from the NKVD. They sent him here from Moscow and dropped him by parachute, to maintain discipline: as if discipline were the single most important consideration. For that matter, I don’t get along all that well with Maksim, either.”
Mendel was determined to strike while the iron was hot.
“So tell me, what happened between Gedale and the commander?”
“Well, there was a quarrel, at the beginning of the winter. They hadn’t been getting along for some time, Ulybin and Gedale. No, not because of the violin, there were more serious issues. Gedale wanted to roam through the woods and marshes and assemble a band of Jewish partisans. Ulybin on the other hand said that Moscow had given different orders; Jewish combatants were to be taken in a few at a time and incorporated into Russian units. The real break came when Gedale wrote a letter and sent it to Novoselky without Ulybin’s permission; I don’t know what was in that letter, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you which of the two was right, either. The fact remains that Ulybin was furious, he was shouting so loud that you could hear him throughout the camp, and he was pounding the table with his fists.”
“What was he shouting?”
“I couldn’t really hear,” Pyotr replied, flushing red.
“What was he shouting?” Mendel insisted.
“He was shouting that in his unit they were sick of hearing about poets.”
“I’ll bet he didn’t exactly say ‘poets,’” said Mendel.
“You’re right. He didn’t say ‘poets.’” Pyotr fell silent for a moment, then he added, “But tell me something: is it true that you were the ones
who crucified Jesus?”
• • •
In the Turov camp the Novoselky refugees found safety and a certain material well-being, but they weren’t entirely comfortable. The four men from Ozarichi were inducted as regulation members; the six others, including the two women, were given various service jobs. Ulybin, a few days after their arrival, received them with distant courtesy, but then he disappeared.
The temperature had gradually dropped; around mid-January it was -15 degrees centigrade, and by late January it fell to 30 below. Small ski patrols set out from the camp, on provisioning expeditions, or on harassment and sabotage operations about which Mendel got fragmentary news from Pyotr.
One day Ulybin sent to inquire whether any of them spoke German. All six Jews spoke it, more or less fluently, with a more or less pronounced Yiddish accent: but why was he asking? What was it about? Ulybin, through Maksim, let it be known that he wished to speak to the man with the best accent—not the women, they wouldn’t be useful for the matter in question.
That night, in the well-heated barracks, a special meal was handed out. Shortly after sunset a sledge had arrived in the camp, unloaded a crate, and taken off again immediately; at dinner, the quartermaster gave everyone a tin can with an unusual shape. Mendel turned it over and over in his hands, baffled: it was heavy, it had no label, and the lid, soldered on for an airtight fit, was smaller than the outside diameter of the can itself. He noticed that the other diners used the tip of their knife to punch two holes in the circular area around the lid: a small hole and a larger one, and they poured a little water into the larger hole, and then plugged it up with a chunk of bread. Increasingly intrigued, he did as they had, and he felt the can heat up in his hand until it was scalding hot, while the familiar scent of acetylene wafted out of the hole still left open. Like the others, he held a lit match close to the hole, and before long the table was surrounded by a cheerful circle of flickering flames, as if in a fairy tale. Inside the can was meat and peas; in the outer jacket there was carbide, which heated the contents when it reacted with water.